Here and There

I had to show you what is going on in my kitchen "farm". The potted tomato plant that I bought a couple of months ago has grown like crazy. The plant itself is as big or bigger than many I've seen in a lot of gardens. I couldn't even get the height all captured in this snapshot. Remarkably, for such an enormous plant, It's only sprouted that one tiny tomato. It is ripe and ready for pickin' but it is only about the size of a golf ball. Somewhere between a cherry tomato and a Roma. And there are no other tomatoes anywhere on the plant. How hysterical will it be if I manage to grow a giant indoor tomato plant but only get that one single tomato all season?

I've been spending parts of my sunny afternoons hanging out on the Christopher St. Piers. It's a nice bike ride over there from the East side, and of course, the eye candy is top notch on any given day. This weekend it was absolutely packed with boys (and girls, and trannies) getting some vitamin D. I usually arrive around 2:30 or 3:00 and stay an hour and a half at most. Just enough time to catch a cat nap and lust after guys I'm too old for. I snapped this picture yesterday, to give you a sense of the huge crowd, but it made me a little nostalgic for the old pier.



When I first moved to NYC the Christopher St. Pier was still in a horrible state of decay. The end of it, deemed unsafe, was blocked off with fence and concrete barricades. Many gay men simply pried open the fence and hopped the barricades to claim a section of tar beach that faced an equally run-down Jersey City. While it was certainly not official policy, the end of the pier was clothing optional. I never dared to bare all at the time, but I would frequently simply show up and strip off whatever I was wearing down to my underwear. It felt modest compared to the avowed nudists who were always nearby. Occasionally, you'd encounter someone that would take advantage of the (relative) privacy to lazily spend the afternoon masturbating as the boats sailed by. I was never sure if it was self-gratification or advertising. Probably both.

And while I'm not one of those cranky middle-aged queens that constantly longs to recapture the days gone by and rail against (unavoidable) progress, I do on occasion miss that broken down, graffiti covered oasis of neglect. Like my lost (and wasted) youth, never to return, and probably best forgotten.